SENTIMENT AND NAILS
Vast changes had come over the face of that land in a few days. Every
quarter-section within reach of water for domestic uses had its tent or
its dugout in the hillside or its hastily built cabin of planks. Where
miles of unpeopled desert had stretched lonely and gray a week before,
the smoke of three thousand fires rose up each morning now, proclaiming
a new domain in the kingdom of husbandry.
On the different levels of that rugged country, men and women had
planted their tent-poles and their hopes. Unacquainted with its rigors,
they were unappalled by the hardships, which lay ahead of them, dimly
understood. For that early autumn weather was benignant, and the sun was
mellow on the hills.
Speculation had not turned out as profitable as those who had come to
practice it had expected. Outside of the anxiety of Jerry Boyle and
others to get possession of the apparently worthless piece of land upon
which Dr. Slavens had filed, there were no offers for the relinquishment
of homesteads. That being the case, a great many holders of low numbers
failed to file. They wanted, not homes, but something without much
endeavor, with little investment and no sweat. So they had passed on to
prey upon the thrifty somewhere else, leaving the land to those whose
hearts were hungry for it because it _was_ land, with the wide horizon
of freedom around it, and a place to make home.
And these turned themselves to bravely leveling with road-scrapers and
teams the hummocks where the sagebrush grew, bringing in surveyors to
strike the level for them in the river-shore, plotting ditches to carry
the water to their fields. Many of them would falter before the fight
was done; many would lose heart in the face of such great odds before
the green blessing of alfalfa should rise out of the sullen ground.
Many a widow was there, whose heart was buried in a grave back East, and
many a gray man, making his first independent start. Always the West has
held up its promise of freedom to men, and the hope of it has led them
farther than the hope of gold.
About midway between Meander and Comanche, Agnes Horton was located on
the land which Smith had selected for her. Smith had retired from
driving the stage and had established a sort of commercial center on his
homestead, where he had a store for supplying the settlers' needs. He
also had gone into the business of contracting to clear lands of
sagebrush and level them for irrigation, having had a large experience
in that work in other parts of the state.
Agnes had pitched her tent on the river-bank, in a pleasant spot where
there was plenty of grazing for her horse. Just across her line, and
only a few hundred yards up-stream, a family was encamped, putting up a
permanent home, making a reckless inroad among the cottonwoods which
grew along the river on their land. Across the stream, which was
fordable there, a young man and his younger wife, with the saddle-marks
of the city on them, had their white nest. Agnes could hear the bride
singing early in the morning, when the sun came up and poured its melted
gold over that hopeful scene, with never a cloud before its face.
Twenty miles farther along, toward Comanche, Dr. Slavens had pitched his
tent among the rocks on the high, barren piece of land which he had
selected blindly, guided by Hun Shanklin's figures. He was not a little
surprised, and at the same time cheered and encouraged, to find, when he
came to locating it, that it was the spot where they had seen Shanklin
and another horseman on the afternoon of their stage excursion, when the
two had been taken by Smith as men of evil intent, and the doctor had
been called to the box to handle the lines.
His neighbors in the rich valley below him regarded him with doubt of
his balance, and that was a current suspicion up and down the river
among those who did not know the story. But the politicians in Meander,
and those who were on hand before the filing began, who knew how Jerry
Boyle had nursed Axel Peterson, and how he had dropped the Scandinavian
when the stranger rode up unexpectedly and filed on Number One, believed
that the doctor had held inside information, and that his claim was
worth millions.
But if the quarter-section contained anything of value, there was no
evidence of it that Dr. Slavens could find. It was about the crudest and
most unfinished piece of earth that he ever had seen outside the
Buckhorn Cañon. It looked as if the materials for making something on a
tremendous pattern had been assembled there, thrown down promiscuously,
and abandoned.
Ledges of red rock, which seemed as if fires had scorched them for ages,
stood edgewise in the troubled earth, their seamed faces toward the sky.
It was as if nature had put down that job temporarily, to hurry off and
finish the river, or the hills beyond the river, and never had found
time to come back. Tumbled fragments of stone, huge as houses, showing
kinship with nothing in their surroundings, stood here thickly in a
little cup between the seared hills, and balanced there upon the sides
of buttes among the streaks of blue shale.
A little grass grew here and there in carpet-size splotches, now yellow
and dry, while that in the valley was at its best. Spiked plants, which
looked tropical, and which were as green during the rigors of winter as
during the doubtful blessings of summer, stood on the slopes, their
thousand bayonets guarding against trespass where only pressing
necessity could drive a human foot. Sheep-sage, which grew low upon the
ground, and unostentatious and dun, was found here, where no flocks came
to graze; this was the one life-giving thing which sprang from that
blasted spot.
The lowest elevation on the doctor's claim was several hundred feet
above the river, from which he hauled the water which he drank and used
for culinary purposes. If there was wealth in the land and rocks, nature
had masked it very well indeed. The pick and the hammer revealed
nothing; long hours of prying and exploring yielded no gleam of metal to
confirm his fast-shrinking belief that he had pitched on something
good.
His only comfort in those first days was the thought of the money which
he had taken from Shanklin, with the aid of the gambler's own honest
little die. That cash was now safe in the bank at Meander. There was
enough of it, everything else failing, to take him--and somebody--back
to his own place when she was ready to go; enough to do that and get the
automobile, take the world on its vain side, and pull success away from
it. He was able for it now; no doubt of his ability to climb over any
obstacle whatever remained after his wrestling match with the river in
the Buckhorn Cañon. There was no job ahead of him that he could even
imagine, as big as that.
Nobody had come forward to make him an offer for his place. Jerry Boyle
had not appeared, nothing had been seen of the man who accosted him at
the window the morning he filed. Although he had remained in Meander two
days after that event, nobody had approached him in regard to the land
which so many had seemed anxious to get before it came into his
ownership. Boyle he had not seen since the evening Dr. Slavens and Agnes
met him in the gorge riding in such anxious haste.
Perhaps the value of the claim, if value lay in it, was the secret of a
few, and those few had joined forces to starve out his courage and hope.
If nobody came forward with a voluntary offer for the land, it never
would be worth proving up on and paying the government the price asked
for it. All over that country there was better land to be had without
cost.
As the days slipped past and nobody appeared with ten thousand dollars
bulging his pockets, Slavens began to talk to himself among the
solitudes of his desert. He called himself a foremost example of
stupidity and thick-headedness for not giving ear to the man who wanted
to talk business the day he filed on that outcast corner of the earth.
Then, growing stubborn, he would determine to pay the government the
purchase price, clean up on it at once, and take title to it. Then, if
it _had_ the stuff in it, they might come around with some sort of offer
in time.
No matter; he would stick to it himself until winter. That always was
his final conclusion, influenced, perhaps, by a hope that the roughness
of winter would speedily convince "somebody" that roses and dreams of
roses belonged to the summer. He would have nothing more to pay on the
homestead for a year. And much could happen in a year, in a day; even an
hour.
Slavens had a good tent in a sheltered place, which he believed he could
make comfortable for winter, and he meant to send for some books.
Meantime, he had tobacco to smoke and a rifle to practice with, and
prospects ahead, no matter which way the cat might jump.
The doctor's target practice was a strong contributing force to the
general belief among his neighbors that he was deranged. They said he
imagined that he was repelling invaders from his claim, which would be
valuable, maybe, to a man who wanted to start a rattlesnake farm. But
Slavens had a motive, more weighty than the pastime that this seemingly
idle pursuit afforded. There was a time of settlement ahead between him
and Jerry Boyle for the part the Governor's son had borne in his
assault. When the day for that adjustment came, Slavens intended to seek
it.
Concerning Shanklin, he was in a degree satisfied with what he had done.
The loss of that much money, he believed, was a greater drain on the old
crook than a gallon of blood. Slavens felt that it hurt Shanklin in the
gambler's one sensitive spot. There was a great deal owing to him yet
from that man, in spite of what he had forced Shanklin to pay, and he
meant to collect the balance before he left that state.
So the rifle practice went ahead, day by day, supplemented by a turn now
and then with Hun Shanklin's old black pistol, which Mackenzie had
turned over to Slavens as part of his lawful spoil.
While Dr. Slavens banged away among his rocks, not knowing whether he
was a victim of his own impetuosity or the peculiarly favored son of
fortune, Agnes Horton, in her tent beside the river, was undergoing an
adjustment of vision which was assisting her to see startlingly things
exactly as they were. The enchantment of distance had fallen away. When
she came to grips with the land, then its wild unfriendliness was
revealed, and the magnitude of the task ahead of her was made
discouragingly plain.
All over her cultivable strip of land which lay between the river and
the hills, the gray sage grew in clumps, each cluster anchoring the soil
around it in a little mound. Through many years the earth had blown and
sifted around the sapless shrubs until they seemed buried to the ears,
and hopeless of ever getting out again, but living on their gray life in
a gray world, waiting for the best.
All of this ground must be leveled before it could receive the benefits
of irrigation, and the surprising thing to her was how much wood the
land yielded during this operation. Each little sagebrush had at least
twenty times as much timber under the earth as it had above, and each
thick, tough root was a retarding and vexatious obstacle in the way of
scraper and plow. Smith said it was sometimes necessary in that country
to move three acres of land in order to make one.
But Smith was enthusiastically for it. He kept asserting that it paid,
and pointed to the small bit of agricultural land that there was in the
whole expanse of that reservation, for an example, to prove his point.
There was room for other industries, such as mining and grazing, but the
man who could grow food and forage for the others was the one who would
take down the money from the hook. That was Smith's contention.
He told Agnes that she could lift enough water with a wheel in the river
to irrigate a garden and more, but there was no need of putting in the
wheel until spring. The rains of that season would bring up the seed,
and while it was making the most of the moisture in the ground she could
be setting her wheel.
"A person's got to plan ahead in this country," said Smith. "You must
know to a skinned knuckle just what you'll need a year, or five years,
ahead here, if you ever make it go worth havin'. It ain't like it is
back where you come from. There you can go it more or less hit-or-miss,
and hit about as often as you miss. Here you've got to know."
Smith was moving to organize the settlers along the river into a company
to put in a canal which would water all their land, the chief capital to
be elbow-grease; the work to be done that fall and winter. Smith was
indeed the head and inspiration of all enterprise in that new place.
People to whom that country was strange, and that included nearly all of
them, looked to him for advice, and regarded with admiration and wonder
his aptness in answering everything.
Agnes was doubtful of the future, in spite of her big, brave talk to Dr.
Slavens in the days before the drawing. Now that she had the land, and a
better piece of it than she had hoped for, considering her high number,
she felt weakly unfit to take it in hand and break it to the condition
of docility in which it would tolerate fruit-trees, vines, and roses.
It cheered her considerably, and renewed her faith in her sex, to see
some of the women out with their teams, preparing their land for the
seeding next spring. More than one of them had no man to lean on, and no
money to hire one to take the rough edge off for her. In that respect
Agnes contrasted her easier situation with theirs. She had the means,
slender as they might be, indeed, to employ somebody to do the work in
the field. But the roses she reserved for her own hands, putting them
aside as one conceals a poem which one has written, or a hope of which
he is afraid.
In the first few days of her residence on her land, Agnes experienced
all the changes of mercurial rising and falling of spirits, plans,
dreams. Some days she saddled her horse, which she had bought under the
doctor's guidance at Meander, and rode, singing, over the hills, exalted
by the wild beauty of nature entirely unadorned. There was not yet a
house in the whole of what had been the Indian Reservation, and there
never had been one which could be properly called such.
Here was a country, bigger than any one of several of the far eastern
states, as yet unchanged by the art of man. The vastness of it, and the
liberty, would lay hold of her at such times with rude power, making her
feel herself a part of it, as old a part of it as its level-topped
buttes and ramparts of riven stone.
Then again it frightened her, giving her a feeling such as she
remembered once when she found herself alone in a boat upon a great
lake, with the shore left far behind and none in sight beyond the misty
horizon. She seemed small then, and inadequate for the rough struggle
that lay ahead.
Smith noted this, and read the symptoms like a doctor.
"You've got to keep your nerve," he advised, bluntly kind, "and not let
the lonesomeness git a hold on you, Miss Horton."
"The lonesomeness?" she echoed. It seemed a strange-sounding phrase.
"It's a disease," Smith proceeded, "and I suppose you git it anywhere;
but you git it harder here. I've seen men take it, and turn gray and
lose their minds, runnin' sheep. After you once git over it you're
broke. You wouldn't leave this country for a purty on a chain."
"I hope I'll not get it," she laughed. "How do people act when they take
the lonesomeness?"
"Well, some acts one way and some acts another," said Smith. "Some mopes
and run holler-eyed, and some kicks and complains and talk about 'God's
country' till it makes you sick. Just like this wasn't as much God's
country as any place you can name! It's all His'n when you come down to
the p'int, I reckon. But how a woman acts when she takes it I can't so
much say for I never knew but one that had it. She up and killed a
man."
"Oh, that was terrible! Did she lose her mind?"
"Well, I don't know but you could say she did. You see she married a
sheepman. He brought her out here from Omaha, and left her up there on
the side of the mountain in a little log cabin above Meander while he
went off foolin' around with them sheep, the way them fellers does. I
tell you when you git sheep on the brain you don't eat at home more than
once in three months. You live around in a sheep-wagon, cuttin' tails
off of lambs, and all such fool things as that."
"Why, do they cut the poor things' tails off?" she asked, getting the
notion that Smith was having a little fun at her expense.
"They all do it," he informed her, "to keep the sand and burrs out of
'em. If they let 'em grow long they git so heavy with sand it makes 'em
poor to pack 'em, they say, I don't know myself; I'm not a sheepman."
"But why did she shoot a man? Because he cut off lambs' tails?"
"No, she didn't," said Smith. "She went out of her head. The feller she
shot was a storekeeper's son down in Meander, and he got to ridin' up
there to talk to her and cheer her up. The lonesomeness it had such a
hold on her, thinkin' about Omaha and houses, and pie-annos playin' in
every one of 'em, that she up and run off with that feller when he
promised to take her back there. They started to cut across to the U.P.
in a wagon--more than a hundred miles. That night she come to her head
when he got too fresh, and she had to shoot him to make him behave."
"Her husband should have been shot, it seems to me, for leaving her that
way," Agnes said.
"A man orto stick to his wife in this country, specially if she's new to
it and not broke," said Smith; "and if I had one, ma'am, I'd _stick_ to
her."
Smith looked at her as he said this, with conviction and deep
earnestness in his eyes.
"I'm sure you would," she agreed.
"And I'd be kind to her," he declared.
"There's no need to tell me that," she assured him. "You're kind to
everybody."
"And if she didn't like the name," Smith went on significantly, "I'd
have it changed!"
"I'm sure she'd like it--she'd be very ungrateful if she didn't," Agnes
replied, somewhat amused by his earnestness, but afraid to show it. "I'm
going to order lumber for my house in a day or two."
Smith switched from sentiment to business in a flash.
"Let me sell you the nails," he requested. "I can give 'em to you as
cheap as you can git 'em in Meander."